Oh Be Careful Little Ears What You Hear! ~ blog

We have been learning about how to use worship as a tool to fight against sexual temptation. Everything that enters our brain through what we see, hear, touch, and taste creates a response in our brains that can be positive, negative, or neutral. It is how we can make sense of the world around us and can learn what helps us and what harms us.

Sometimes our senses do not tell us the truth or it needs more information to register in our brains whether it is good or bad.  You might sit down to what looks like a delicious meal but after the first bite realize that you are dining at the table of the world’s worst cook.

The reference to a song in my title is from the song O, Be Careful Little Eyes.” A cute song about being careful what you see, what you hear, what you say, what you do with your hands, where you go, whom you trust, and what you think.  I think it could be the theme song for 180 because we have not been careful about what we see, hear, say, do, go, trust, and think.

Porn and sex are like the meal that looks delicious but tastes horrible. Or it looks delicious and tastes incredibly good, but if Aunt Betty’s awesome potato salad has been sitting in the sun for an hour of so it may contain bacteria, viruses, or parasites and you will experience some extremely difficult trips to the bathroom where you do not know whether you should sit of kneel first. Or, you may be allergic to the food.  Looks good, tastes great, but in the end, you suffer.

Porn always has the promise that it is going to make you feel good and it does while you are engaging with it. However, you know in the end, you are going to suffer fear, shame, anger, and self-loathing.  But you are not thinking about that because your hormones are raging and woodie is evidence that your amygdala is on fire. Reason and logic are locked out of the room and you want another big O.

We all know this stuff and what we need to do is learn to make ourselves choose a different action as a response to the feelings we are having before we have another fall into sexual sin. You are lonely, bored, stressed, frustrated, worried which are all normal feelings especially considering the world pandemic and the stuff we hear on the news daily. We tune in because we want to know what is happening and we hear stuff that causes fear, worry, and anxiety.

Can I make a simple suggestion? 

Stop all news input into your brain for a week and see how you feel.

However, in dealing with addictive behavior is not just trying to stop that behavior which is going to make you stop. We have all tried that hundreds of times. One does not stop drinking while still going to the bar with friends. Or trying to stop looking at porn when you spend hours on the internet or staying connected with your phone.

The solution that we ourselves must begin to do is to take actions that lead to positive results and cause us to feel good emotions instead of allowing the negative emotions to drive us back to our addictive behaviors.

The two actions that I have found helping me deal with the feelings which used to drive me back to sexual sin and have helped me escaped the lure of lust are meditation on Scripture and worship.  Other actions can be going for a walk and getting exercise. Doing anything that is creative like painting, playing an instrument, learning to cook, learning something new like another language, taking an online course. There are literally dozens of things you could do that would benefit the way you feel and are healthy for you.

However, one of the easiest and best ways to deal with the feelings that drive you to porn is to do something that induces pleasurable feelings in your brain that are not sexual.  And I think that is worship. The most frequent command in the Bible is the idea of rejoicing, singing, and praising the Lord. Almost 500 times we find this action mentioned.

And do you know what God is desiring for us to be experiencing so that we will be people who praise, worship, and rejoice? He wants us to be happy. Happiness is what brings forth praise. Yes, there is music that can cause you to feel things other than joy. Music actually creates emotions in us based on the kind of music it is, the tempo it is using, whether the key is major or minor and even the instruments being played.

Let’s not over-analyze this although some study about the impact of music on our feelings might be of interest to some of you.  My wife and one of my sons are musicians and singers and know a lot about music and how it affects you when you hear it. Actually, just listen while you are watching a movie of TV show and notice the music that is being played to cause you to feel what the producers want you to experience.

Let me bottom line it for you. I exhort you to begin to create a playlist of your favorite worship songs. Have music you can easily access and can listen to anywhere and at any time.  I have several albums in my iTunes account that all have songs that lift my spirit and create feelings of joy and appreciation towards God.

Take a half-hour a day to just sit and listen to worship music focusing on the words and expressing worship to God. It will begin to change the way you feel and help you battle the temptation to look at more garbage or being filled with stress and worry from our world news today.

Fast from the news…

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